Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Homosexuality and math

Are straight guys better at math than gay guys? Are lesbians better than hetero females? The Add Health Study asked teens what grade they earned in math last term. A's were assigned a 4, B's a 3, C's a 2, and D's or lower a 1. Here are the means:

The problem with any statistic involving self-identified gays is that higher-IQ gays are, I would imagine, more likely to identify as gay. Lower IQ gays are more likely to pretend to be straight.

That means that any estimate of gay IQ is going to overstate gay IQ because the sample disproportionately excludes low-IQ gays.

Gays have more estrogen than straights, so I'd guess that gays would have similarly impaired spatial ability, and so their IQs would be lower than straight men, although probably still higher than female IQ.

I remember reading research on one of the evo blogs that showed a difference in estrogen levels (or maybe some other female hormone, I forget) between gay and straight men. The difference wasn't much though. Testosterone I don't know about.

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